This disclosure relates generally to online systems, and in particular to view prediction of videos presented by online systems.
Certain online systems, such as social networking systems, allow their users to connect to and to communicate with other online system users. Users may create profiles on such an online system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. Because of the increasing popularity of these types of online systems and the increasing amount of user-specific information maintained by such online systems, an online system provides an ideal forum for third party systems to increase awareness about products or services to online system users. For example, the online system can present content items, e.g., videos, received from a third party system to users of the online system.
In some cases, content providers must spend money to provide videos and other content items to online system users, and they may have a limited budget. Yet, conventional systems do not provide a way for content providers to know that they will receive an acceptable number of views of their videos by users for their budget to meet their goals reaching enough users with the content. Further, content providers often do not have clear insight into how much to spend to get a sufficient number of views.